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Facebook Memories Are a Hot Mess

We all know the Facebook story. Some nerd got an idea to creep on hot girls at Harvard, Justin Timberlake got involved (forgive me, I fell asleep during The Social Network), and the website went on to become bigger than the biggest country on the planet.

In fact, millions and millions of people still use it daily, and it’s still the most used social network, but reported figures paint a slightly grimmer picture. In 2014, Facebook was the only major social network to see a drop in its average active users, i.e. people who actually use Facebook to post on someone else’s page. Ask any young person under 21 if they Facebook, and they’ll probably respond with something like, “New phone, who dis?”

So far, the only image I’ve felt worth remembering holds no real emotional value. It is of a dead squirrel I saw holding a can of Coke.

Facebook keeps trying to get users to interact with one another, the result of which is always a little painful. Years ago, Facebook used to push users to reconnect with friends they haven’t interacted with in a while by prompting them to write on their timelines (then known as walls). This was especially fun when its algorithm kept urging me to “say hi” to classmates from high school whom I would otherwise pretend not to know IRL, as well as my dead best friend.

Facebook’s forced nostalgia is awkward and heavy-handed at best. In 2014, the company even apologized for the “Year in Review” that showed a customizable slideshow of your year, regardless of how bad or good it was. Suddenly, people everywhere were reminded of their deceased children and burned-down apartments.

Which brings us to its most recent effort, “On This Day.” This is a sadistic throwback feature, a grab at nostalgia not unlike TimeHop that lets you relive what you posted on the same day three, four, five years ago. As with TimeHop and #tbt photos, it’s also kind of sad to see anyone use it in earnest, as it's intended to let you wistfully look back at days when you were (probably) better-looking, or more relevant, or not who you are now. (A case can be made that it maybe is useful if you're looking to delete bad opinions and cryptic song lyrics posted in 2007.)

This is what I find difficult to wrap my head around: Why would Facebook trot out a risky product that feels so lazy?

Unlike with “Year in Review,” you can control when or if you want to see these notifications. But sometimes, on what maybe Facebook thinks are important days, for no apparent reason you get a default notification with Facebook saying, “We care about you and the memories that you share here. We thought that you’d like to look back on this post from [number of years] ago” with, of course, no regard to the memory in question (because algorithms cannot detect emotional value—yet?). This is what I find difficult to wrap my head around: Why would Facebook trot out a risky product that feels so lazy? Are they just not trying anymore?

Here’s the thing—most of what’s posted on Facebook is better off forgotten, or at least never remembered; it’s why Snapchat's taken off and why Facebook has become a hangout for grandmas. Very rarely does anyone post something worth noting on Facebook, making the majority of your “memories” useless and confusing. Often, when I look at “On This Day,” I’m left more embarrassed for my past self than I should be allowed to feel on a Monday. Mostly, I wonder how an algorithm can be so bad that it prompts me to care about memories like this one:

I don’t remember why I took this photo, and I don’t know why I thought it was worth posting. So far, the only image I’ve felt worth remembering holds no real emotional value. It is of a dead squirrel I saw holding a can of Coke. If this is the only significant image I’ve found in all eight years of my Facebook use, maybe I’m empty inside.

Facebook is currently acting like that friend who’s always around, but whom you never feel compelled to hang out with. Of course, you’re probably never going to leave that friend—not out of loyalty but out of laziness. So here’s a thought: If you feel the urge to share a memory, don’t. You’ll just end up a little depressed over how you’ve wasted eight years of your life posting the parts of yourself you'll only grow to loathe in another eight years. Like that shitty friend, Facebook has no idea how to stay in its lane. It’s pretending to be a scrapbook when it’s really just a doodle pad.